I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of US cop dramas, films or otherwise. Hill Street Blues is probably the last example of the genre I ever watched and that was a bazillion years ago. Showing my age. After that, in film at least, US buddy cop dramas in particular were a common trope from Lethal Weapon to Bad Boys and everything inbetween, and realism was never high up on the list of priorities.

End of Watch surfaced last year and I ended up watching it the other night as a random choice, purely because I’d heard it was supposed to be quite good and the film we wanted to watch (Django Unchained) was unavailable.

Firstly, this film is chock full of cop-movie clichés, from the banter between the leads played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, to the feats of heroism and in particular the overly-intense Mexican gangster types. But it doesn’t matter (well it does in some instances…) because the film is shot from such a fresh point of view that it completely engages you. The banter is shot from a dashboard camera in the faces of the two leads, and these scenes anchor the film with believable humour and interactions, often with no relevance to the plot, but this film cares more about its characters than the loose plotline involving Mexican drug cartels.

And it’s the characters and their developing story that set this film alight. It’s not long before we find ourselves utterly invested in their lives. They are an incredibly likeable pair, and not without flaws, but the camaraderie and the close attention to their personal lives draws us in and makes us worry all the more for their safety. There is a feeling to this film, in the realism of most of the situations, that anything can happen. The outcome is never certain. Life is cheap on their watch, and death always close by.

There is a found-footage aspect to the way the film is shot and it sets its stall out that way, but doesn’t stick to it. A shaky, roving camera is still employed in scenes where there couldn’t possibly be a camera. That struck me as a little lazy and inconsistent in terms of style, even when I was still enjoying it, but it did draw me out of the movie when Gyllenhaal and Anna Kendrick are enjoying some ‘alone-time’ and we are still seeing it as though someone is standing in the bedroom shooting them with a handheld camera (which they are – it’s a film after all, but I don’t want my attention to be called to this fact). That said, it’s the camera-work that makes the film so special, putting the viewer right in the action, whether it’s a car chase and shootout or a mundane street scene, it creates a convincing point of view that makes you look over your shoulder.

South Central L.A. is the stage for the film, and while there is surely some realism in the way it’s portrayed, it’s so difficult to transcend the tropes set up by the glut of films from the 1990s that were set there. Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, South Central and so many others. There is some mention of how the neighbourhood has changed, which could potentially have been an interesting sociological angle – looking at how Hispanics have moved in large numbers, but in the film, it’s the Mexicans who end up being the bad guys instead of black people. That’s a little unfair, as they do balance it out with Michael Peña showing the flip-side of Mexican culture in L.A., but the stereotypical gangsters are a little ridiculous at times with dialogue that consists of saying ‘fuckin’ at a machine-gun rate.

I really wasn’t expecting to enjoy the film as much as I did, and by the end I was utterly gripped and absorbed in the lives of the two cops. The point of view is so deep that at times you do feel like a silent participant, sitting in the cop car with them listening to the wonderful dialogue exchanges; in the choking miasma of a burning building with them as they rescue some kids from a house fire; eavesdropping on a late-night drunken conversation at the end of a wedding, the kind fuelled by alcohol as well as emotion.

Doubtlessly, the film will not appeal to everyone, and perhaps some people will only see the flaws; the clichés. Maybe even some people might find it boring as its random, directionless nature–which so well represents the highs and lows of a typical work shift–leads them into one drug-den or conversation about relationships too many.

All I’ll say is, even if US cop dramas aren’t your thing, try a fresh point of view and give it a chance.

Autumn has progressed from a gentle breeze to a howling gale, which increases my desire to take refuge and watch horror films. The sequel to [•REC] seemed appropriate, and I’m glad I watched it so soon after viewing the first film as it works best seen as a double bill.

[•REC]2 literally starts the second the first film finishes, opening with that film’s final shot. Best way to sum this up would be: light on character/strong on narrative momentum. I wouldn’t say it was any better or worse than the first film. The original works its ‘plunged-into-chaos’ angle well with a great deal of screaming and running around. The action is a little more focused this time round, following a small group of SWAT-like soldiers blindly heading into the hell of the infected apartment block. I had thought the action was purely going to be viewed through the helmet-cams of the soldiers, but it turned out one of them was carrying a a big camera anyway, and so some of the realism was lost again with the dumping point occurring fairly early on during some gruesome attacks. There is again a great deal of loud commands to ‘record everything!’ because it’s vital, or something, but it just didn’t strike me as convincing. The first time, at least it’s a news crew so the mantra of ‘record everything’ is more believable. This time it just sounds forced and a lame attempt to cover up the poorly thought out scenario surrounding why people would still be recording anything.

One thing that had not occurred to me until watching this sequel was that the use of camera footage in these films is not meant to be ‘found-footage’ in the traditional sense. They fully intend it to be a visceral, on-the-spot, looking through the camera lens point of view. The audience is the camera quite literally. This is obvious by the use of camcorder battery power symbols flashing up, and in the first film seeing the tape being rewound and reviewed in-film. I like that idea as it reminds me of the way first-person narratives in fiction are treated these days. In the past a first person narrative had to be ‘found-footage’ in a sense, i.e. a journal, or memoir, which often leads to stylistic difficulties as dialogue is still written in the classic way, which is unlikely unless qualified in some way by the narrator. Recently I’ve read more first-person that treats the POV as ‘raw sensory data’, which I like, as it requires fewer rules and regulations. But I digress.

There is a much clearer narrative to this film than the first, and a clever POV switch halfway through gives us the story from different viewpoints. The story does, unfortunately drift into traditional horror movie territory, with demonic possession and people making incredibly stupid choices (let’s follow these men down a sewer into the quarantined building! That’ll be fun!), and rather obvious twists that blunt the ending into a groan-inducing experience. There are some loose ends, which occurred perhaps due to my attention drifting but, without giving away spoilers, what happened to the other two teenagers?

It’s simple fun, with the feel of a relentless, action-packed first-person POV shoot-em-up video game. Thrilling at times. Just dumb in places. I can’t say I’m terribly interested in any more sequels.

Yes. I know it’s a five year old film, but I’m exercising my film reviewing muscles. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while on the blog. I even considered starting a separate blog just for film reviewing, but why go to all that trouble? Besides, these are intended to be more than just simple reviews (5 stars!! A fun night out for the whole family!), instead being jumping off points for me to ramble about various stuff, and hey, it’s about writing as often as possible.

Last night I finally saw [REC] the Spanish horror film from 2007 that seems to make so many best-of lists. I admit to being a fan of horror movies, but it’s a rare occasion that a genuinely frightening film comes along. Perhaps I’m too old to be shocked or scared any more? Seen too many old tricks and over-used tropes. It’s a personal quest of mine to find one that brings back that feeling of being completely unsettled. I think the last film to do that was The Descent in the cinema.

I’m afraid to say [REC] didn’t quite tingle the spine in the way I hoped it might. I’ll admit that the last fifteen minutes are pretty terrifying as the situation becomes ever more hopeless and the only method of seeing is through a video camera’s night vision viewfinder. Everything up until that point, while entertaining enough, gruesome and undeniably well put-together seemed fairly pedestrian. Perhaps if I’d seen it at the time it might have had more impact, arriving as it did at the forefront of the whole ‘found-footage’ genre overtaking the cinema experience. Unfortunately, I would not have been able to watch this in the cinema with its motion-sickness inducing hand-held camera-work. At times the screen is shaking so violently it feels like your eyes are spinning in their sockets. It’s an intentional device, of course, to disorientate you, but it’s the kind of device that made me walk out of the cinema after forty minutes of The Bourne Ultimatum.

That is not my biggest complaint about found-footage movies. The main problem with them, which I think is an overwhelming problem, is the issue of how to tell a story like that and make it believable that the person holding the camera would still be holding the camera instead of using it to bash the hideous creature that is trying to rip their throat out. Or, indeed, just dropping the cumbersome, pointless hindrance and running for their life. I guess I’ll call it the ‘dumping point’, i.e. the point where your own self-preservation would absolutely outweigh the desire to keep on filming. This is particularly relevant in Cloverfield where there is no real reason to still be filming from the point everything starts turning chaotic, and the shots that are achieved are far too perfect and contrived to beliveably be someone running for their life. Blair Witch to an extent also suffers from this in its later sequences. The Paranormal Activity movies find a way to get around that with the use of static security cameras, but the way the footage is edited on screen for the benefit of the audience is rather contrived, and there is still handheld work in those films that I can’t believe would be continuing, or even employed in the first place in various scenes.

In [REC] the dumping point comes fairly late on, as there is an internal logic for the filming to continue. The main character, Ángela, continually exhorts her cameraman to keep filming everything, and to his bloody-minded credit he certainly does that. And in the final section, the camera becomes the tool for their ability to see in the dark, which is a clever device for allowing the filming to continue logically and enabling the audience to see what matters. But it’s irrelevant, as earlier on there is a point where the cameraman is right in the middle of an attack, and there is no way the camera would still be in his hands and filming.

The film does have a realistic feeling of chaos and tension, and the claustrophobia in the final scenes is convincing. But here comes my second complaint, although it’s not so much a complaint and more of a general wondering about zombie films.

[REC] is a zombie film. I don’t care what arguments people make for it ‘not technically being a zombie film’. The creatures in it look like and behave like zombies. In the same way that the creatures in 28 Days Later aren’t technically zombies, but they still have overwhelming zombie characteristics. In these zombie films, and I think this applies to pretty much every one, they all exist in an world where there are no zombie films. In every other aspect they reflect our world, complete with pop culture references and everything else, but each one exists independently from each other, and in a vacuum of zombie films or fiction.

These days, in a time when we are obsessed with the shambling flesh-eaters to the point of an almost unironic belief that a zombie apocalypse might actually happen, it seems strange to make any new film where the world represented is a world with no zombie films or literature or video games. Okay, [REC] is five years old, but even then zombie-mania was already starting to reach saturation point, if not quite at the level it is currently. I question how many more zombie fiction/films etc. can be produced without addressing this. Or are we really at the saturation point already? Can anything new be done? I have the [REC] sequel to watch as well, which looks like a video game with its take on the found-footage thing being confined to soldier’s helmet-cams. The second sequel is out now as well and looks frankly ridiculous.

[REC] didn’t become that horror film to end my search for something original and disturbing. It’s entertaining, and an above-par entry to the whole found-footage horror genre.